Ashtavakra Gita

Where is the world, where is the seeker, and where is the practice of renunciation, for the one who has known the self as one without a second?

Phrasing the point as a triple question rather than a flat claim shows how each term, world, seeker, renunciation, depends on the other two to make sense at all.

The verse is built as a triple rhetorical question rather than a flat assertion: rather than stating outright that the world, the seeker, and renunciation do not exist, it asks where they could possibly be found for one who has known the self as one without a second, an echo of the older Chandogya Upanishad's formula ekam evadvitiyam, "one alone, without a second." Each of the three terms named depends on the other two: a world to renounce, a seeker who renounces it, and a practice connecting them. If self-knowledge dissolves the presumed separation underlying all three, none of them retains a place to stand, which is why the verse can only gesture at their absence through a question rather than a flat description. This closes the chapter's argument begun with the rebuke over purity and impurity: not just that thinking, but the entire apparatus of spiritual seeking and its objects, turns out to have nowhere left to be housed.

Ashtavakra Gita